Data from over 1.5 billion Facebook users has been leaked on the dark web

New Delhi: Days after Facebook and its sister companies experienced a 6-hour global outage, reports surfaced claiming that 1.5 billion Facebook users’ data was discovered for sale on a hacker forum. According to a TechRepublic report, the privacy research firm ‘Privacy Affairs’ discovered the personal information of over 1.5 billion people on a hacker forum, including names, email addresses, localities, genders, phone numbers, and Facebook User ID information.

According to Privacy Affairs, the data was obtained by the corporation through scraping.’ This indicates that the seller did not gain access to Facebook’s internal systems, but instead obtained the information by scraping publicly available material and organizing it into databases and lists. However, the security of Facebook users is still jeopardized as a result of the incident. Hackers could use it to reset user passwords and gain access to even more personal information.

When the situation became public, Facebook requested that the post be removed. The message has been removed from the hacker forum, according to the most recent sources. According to Privacy Affairs, the report was made public with the assistance of a four-year-old scraping company. According to the seller, the company has been in operation for four years and has served over 18,000 customers.

If the data released in the breach is genuine, it could be one of the largest and most significant Facebook data dumps ever, according to Privacy Affairs founder and CEO Miklos Zoltan. He also stated that hackers frequently use Facebook Quizzes to gather data. When a person completes one of these surveys or quizzes, they are granting the designers of these games access to their personal Facebook information, which includes their full name, email, phone number, location, gender, and other information, he explained.

Mark Zuckerberg lost $7 billion on Monday, October 4, 2021, due to a worldwide outage of Facebook’s networks, including Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Oculus VR. Users of the social networking sites saw error messages for the majority of the day, causing the Silicon Valley firm’s stock to fall by about 5%.